Then I met my ex- who was driving an auto XE Sentra. While it could get out of its own way, you really had to push the pedal down pretty far and shift it manually. HATED that car. The only upsides to it were pretty good mileage, and it was paid for. Traded it in on an F150. Liked the truck. Missed the gas mileage.

About 8 years ago, the girl i was dating was driving a thunderbird SC and her father sold me a Lumina Z34 for cheap money. I enjoyed them both, except for certain stupid design errors that got expensive and a PITA to fix.

About 8 years ago, the girl i was dating was driving a thunderbird SC and her father sold me a Lumina Z34 for cheap money. I enjoyed them both, except for certain stupid design errors that got expensive and a PITA to fix.

About 8 years ago, the girl i was dating was driving a thunderbird SC and her father sold me a Lumina Z34 for cheap money. I enjoyed them both, except for certain stupid design errors that got expensive and a PITA to fix.

You probably saw a few of these then.
Wish they put a six speed in them.

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They were really kinda crappy. That Gen II body was terrible with the Neon engine, mediocre with the Mitsu Turbo engine. You could get more power out of modding the Gen 1 engines, and I think the cars themselves were a bit lighter. They came with bigger turbos and the cylinder heads became a commodity for the Gen II car owners doing performance mods because the ports flowed better. But the Gen 1 transmissions were pieces of shit, as were many of the revisions of timing belt parts and front engine seals. The turbo outlets and manifolds would crack and leak over time, worse on the Gen 1 cars.

I made a hell of a lot of money off of these things in the '90's. It's no mistake I stayed a Mitsu Tech as long as I did

My sister had the SC300 with the Supra 6 and a 5spd manual. The funny thing is they cost a fraction of what Supra does and you can put turbos on that motor and swap the ECU and have Luxo-Supra for way less than a turbo Supra would cost you.

From what I've heard Yamaha Marine developed the Cylinder heads from scratch and built the bottom end based off of a Ford V-6. The manual gearbox is Mazda.

It is a great looking Engine.

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It wasn't Yamaha Marine. (You may be thinking about OMC doing the original Corvette ZR-1 engine.) The SHO program was just getting started when I joined Ford Engine Engineering. Yamaha was originally tasked with developing a DOHC head package for the 3.0L Vulcan V-6. It quickly became clear that the block was no match for the anticipated power levels, so Yamaha developed the complete engine from scratch.

What an engine it was! It is my favorite V-6 of all time. Our test cars had no rev limiters and a hot calibration. (300 HP at the flywheel was as easy as plugging a chip into the EEC-IV unit.) I was tasked with durability testing the Valeo clutches in some of our test units, and it was a fun job I was forced to go out to Henry's Trimotor runway at the Dearborn Proving Grounds and do great smokey burnouts for hours on end

With no rev limiters, I was able to really explore the powerband on this amazing engine. With proper spark and fuel added back in to the calibration, the engine would pull strong to 10,000 rpm with no complaints. (Well, the Ford 3G alternator would complain after a while, since it was being driven at almost 3x crankshaft speed :huh)

What fun it was to have smoke pouring into the air conditioning vents, and get paid to do it. The work took a few years to bear fruit, with the rod shifter and inproved clutches in later models.

3000GT/Stealth. When I was in college, that was THE cool car to have. I knew two people who had them. One was a slut who lived in our dorm and her rich daddy bought it for her. The second was a guy who was running a "business" bootlegging fireworks from North Dakota into states like Minnesota where they weren't legal. Really, that was what he did.

I loved the last generation big RWD T-Birds and Cougars. At the time, I had a 1989 Cougar. I loved that car.
A friend of mine was obsessed with the early 90's Impala SS. GM took a really ugly car (the Caprice) and made it cool.

Another guy who was one of my best friends for 20 years, until he recently managed to get himself a serious drug habit and I told him he could no longer be around my family still has his 1991 Honda Civic Si. He bought it brand new in college, and it threw a rod two years ago with about 180,000 on it. It's rotting in his garage now, since he has no money or ambition anymore. That was a fun car, and we had some good times in it...